LRAD - Long Range Acoustic Device (pics & science)

Reports of two of these being deployed to Union Square tonight. Here's more info on what they are. The device emits an earsplitting mechanical wave in a narrow beam only 33 inches in diameter. The shrill sound is approximately 150 decibels (1000 W/m?) in intensity, a level that is very capable of permanently damaging hearing.

Carl Gruenler, vice president of military and government operations for American Technology Corp., says that being within 100 yards (meters) of the device is extremely painful, but its use should be limited to 300 yards to be effectively used. He concedes that the device is powerful enough to cause permanent auditory damage, but that it is only meant to be used for a few seconds at a time.

The device, which weighs around only 45 pounds, is currently being tested in regions of Baghdad Baghdad. The device was originally intended to be used by American warships to warn incoming vessels of their arrival, but have become another piece of America's weapons intended to deter but not kill. A similar device is the Active Denial System, which uses a painful energy beam to discourage would-be attackers.

Sparkle girl starkly oppose this inhuman perversion of sound and imagination known as LRAD.

Sparkle Girl is a guerilla sound-art project founded in 1997, A "garbage noise duet" and "cultural terrorist affinity group", Sparkle Girl is a decidedly non-academic, anti-hegemonic, sonic circus of resentment. Sparkle Girl makes few concessions to taste, talent, quality or other such mystical abstractions. In the spirit of play, Sparkle Girl is engaged in the cultural production of sound collages, field recordings, free improvisations and loose compositions. Our work is sonic, visual, literary and propagandistic in nature. Our work as Sparkle Girl represents an assimilation and assortment of our daily experience with sound, media and our own nervous systems. Sparkle Girl attempts to DEMONSTRATE imagination without specialization. You do not have to PAY us to get up onstage and be confident FOR you. We resist hegemony, economic and otherwise, even the hegemony of our own spectacular horror. we have NUMBERED THE LIVE PANIC AND ADDED THE DAYS OF THE WEEK.

It has just come to Sparkle Girl's attention that the U.S. military has a new toy, the "Long Range Acoustic Device, or LRAD". This nefarious instrument of sonic torture promises to be useful for "dispersing hostile crowds and warding off potential enemy combatants". With their customary scientific precision, CNN describes its function; "It blasts earsplitting noise in a directed beam". Sparkle Girl is unimpressed. We have been doing that for years.

"The developer of the LRAD, American Technology Corp. of San Diego, recently got a $1.1 million contract from the U.S. Marine Corps to buy the gadgets for units deployed to Iraq". Must be nice. As usual, big business is in collusion with the repressive foot soldiers of state terror, all the worse for Sparkle Girl.

That it was described as an "auditory barrage dispenser" is proof-positive that these billionaire bureaucrats did not hesitate to loot the reams of critical analysis written about Sparkle Girl and subvert those sacred texts to their own reptilian and insidious ends. "Dubbed "The Sound of Force Protection" in a company brochure, the devices can broadcast sound files containing warning messages." Sparkle Girl has been broadcasting "warning messages" for 5 grueling years, and the parasitical pigs in power still aren't listening!

"Free improvisation is not an action resulting from freedom; it is an action directed toward freedom."
anon?

"The path of total police control over all human activities and the path of infinite free creation of all human activities are one: it is the same path of modern discoveries. We are necessarily on the same path as our enemies—most often preceding them—but we must be there, without any confusion, as enemies. The best will win."
Kristeva

Bullets cause a little more permanent damage, and to quote brooke shields, when you lose your life, you lose a lot. This weapon was developed in the aftermath of the Cole attack. The dead sailors don't deserve your second-guessed sniping. And i've been to baghdad ... and mosul ... and nasariyah ... and tikrit ... and samarra ... and basra ... and a hundred villages you never heard of. I didn't want to be there, but i was. And in that situation, i choose my life and my buddy's life over the hearing of a man coming at me with an AK-47 on rock 'n' roll. Sorry.